$200 Million Went to House Members to Pass Fast Track – Here's Who Took the Cash

June 23, 2015 - Paola Casale

TPA passed with a mere 219-211 vote with only 218 needed to pass. The real shocker comes from the amount of money each Representative received for a yes vote. In total, $197,869,145 was given to Representatives for a yes vote where as $23,065,231 was given in opposition.

This change ensures that moving forward, ingredients derived from synthetic biology will not be allowed in the more than 33,000 products that are Verified by the Non-GMO Project, North America’s only third party verification program for non-GMO food and products. Synthetic biology — or synbio — is a new set of “extreme” genetic engineering techniques that include using synthetic DNA to re-engineer organisms, such as yeast and algae, to produce substances they would not normally produce.

Many non-GMO feed suppliers report better animal health with non-GMO feed. “I get comments from people who switched from GMO feed to our feed, and they say how healthier their chickens are,” Yantis said.

Yantis even sold one customer eight tons of non-GMO corn to feed deer. “No one would have cared about this a few years ago,” he said.The fact that more farmers are interested in growing non-GMO corn and soybeans is helping the supply. “More farmers are refusing to pay for the Monsanto tech fees, and more supply is becoming available,” Frantzen added.

“We’ve gotten requests from customers to be Non-GMO Project verified. That’s the next step,” Shutt said.

Abby Martin goes over the publication of a study on how genetically modified foods (GMOs) affect living organisms, as well as the pushback the study received by the GMO companies like Monsanto who fought unsuccessfully to silence the findings of the research.

Taxpayer resources called subsidies are used to support growing crops in a chemically-intensive, genetically and financially engineered kind of way. It drives shareholder return for the companies that have developed these genetically engineered crops and the weedkillers, herbicides and insecticides used to treat them. While on the other hand, farmers that are growing crops organically, which means by law without the use of synthetic pesticides and genetically engineered seeds designed to require increasing doses of toxic weed killer, have to pay fees to prove that their crops are safe, then fees to label those crops with the “USDA Organic” seal and then they don’t receive the same crop insurance and marketing assistance programs that the other farmers do.

So what’s a consumer to do? Learn the Big 8. These are the ingredients which, by law and according to the United States Department of Agriculture, are not allowed into the production of foods that are made organically:

We called McNeil and asked. Yes, you can count on a dose of Roundup Ready GMO corn with plant incorporated pesticides to go with your acetaminophen. GMOs lurk in places you may never have thought of. The only way to find out if your OTC/prescription meds and vitamins contain GMOs is to call the company and ask.

Through the secretive meetings of the American Legislative Exchange Council, corporate lobbyists and state legislators vote as equals on ‘model bills’ to change our rights that often benefit the corporations’ bottom line at public expense. ALEC is a pay-to-play operation where corporations buy a seat and a vote on ‘task forces’ to advance their legislative wish lists and can get a tax break for donations, effectively passing these lobbying costs on to taxpayers.

"What we're challenging is EPA's inaction despite a body of evidence" that inert pesticide ingredients can be just as harmful as active ones, plaintiffs' attorney Yana Garcia told Courthouse News.

"Chemicals listed as inert are not inert," she said. "Consumers think the inert ingredients are water or other benign substances used to mix the chemicals, but many are carcinogenic and others have acute impacts and still others have impacts that are currently unknown."

While Monsanto tries to dodge a class action lawsuit in California by requesting that it be dismissed by the court, a federal judge in Argentina has accepted a class action lawsuit that would force GMO labeling and provisionally suspend the cultivation of genetically modified crops.

Monsanto is not the only party listed as a defendant. Also listed are:•The Argentine national government•The Federal Council for the Environment•A group of companies, including Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Novartis, Nidera, Dow AgroSciences, Pioneer, Agrevo, Ciba Geigy, Argenbio, and Bayer Sciences

Monsanto is currently trying to remove their class action suit being filed by T. Matthew Phillips to federal court in order to “prohibit inconsistencies in ruling,” but they also want to have the class action suit dismissed.

First, labeling is a simple and common sense solution to protect consumer choice. Companies that grow and sell genetically modified foods haven't yet come up with a convincing excuse to explain why their customers should not have this information. When those companies spend untold millions to keep their customers in the dark by battling efforts to properly label their products, we ask why. And when they tell us products shouldn't be labeled because they haven't been proven unsafe, we call foul. Food labels contain lots of information, from complete lists of ingredients to whether a product is homogenized.

GM labeling initiatives are being debated in a number of states. Here is genetically modified corn.

Right now, a British company named Oxitec is planning to release genetically modified mosquitoes into the fragile enviroment of the Florida Keys. The company wants to use the Florida Keys as a testing ground for these mutant bugs.

But now, some organic food advocates are concerned about a completed purchase of Applegate by one of the most notorious pro-GMO meat companies in the world: Hormel, which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat GMO labeling initiatives in key states.

Will Applegate’s standards stay the same or will big business take over and start making a few unwanted changes?

Attorney T. Matthew Phillips recently announced a shift in his LA County Class action suit against Monsanto’s Roundup for false advertising...

So instead of only California residents, this class action suit will now involve anyone in the whole nation who has purchased Roundup during the last four years. It’s not a personal injury suit. It’s a valid false advertising claim. If all goes well with the false advertising suit, a personal injury class action legal claim may ensue, according to Phillips.

So instead of only California residents, this class action suit will now involve anyone in the whole nation who has purchased Roundup during the last four years. It’s not a personal injury suit. It’s a valid false advertising claim. If all goes well with the false advertising suit, a personal injury class action legal claim may ensue, according to Phillips.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault has been in service for over six years, but the public remains mystified by the project. Buried under the permafrost of Norway, the vault is now home to over 500,000 samples of crop germplasms. Originally conceived in the 1980s as a 100-year experiment to test the durability of seeds in cold environments, the project struggled to find donors—that is, until an eyebrow-raising team of behemoths–including the Bill Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto, and Syngenta–decided to invest. And they invested big: the Bill Gates Foundation alone has poured in $30 million.